


Quit This Earth, to Mingle With His Stars

by akathecentimetre



Series: A Gentleman's Agreement [10]
Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: F/M, M/M, Photography, The Folly, Weddings, collecting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-07
Updated: 2017-11-07
Packaged: 2019-01-30 19:20:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,646
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12659796
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/akathecentimetre/pseuds/akathecentimetre
Summary: Molly the magpie, thief of things and moments and time, spends over twenty years collecting for the wedding album.





	Quit This Earth, to Mingle With His Stars

*

**Summer, 2014**

Molly had always been a magpie.

Her first Folly masters had beaten her for it, called her thief, and were subdued into bewildered apology only when they realized that, apart from the one piece of glitter or shine they had taken objection to losing, the collection she kept under the cellar stairs was hardly of value to anyone else. A scrap of colored cloth soiled from the kitchen; a ball of dust that refused to unsnarl; a piece of pottery broken when someone had tripped in the scullery and sent a stack of plates filthy from a banquet flying – these were her first treasures, and, so she thought, what would be her only ones.

She collected more, when the war came. When a room had to be emptied because its owner wasn’t coming back, she – more and more often, as the staff left in trickles and drabs and were killed themselves by doodlebugs – was left to pack up the things which had to be sent back to distant families who had little idea what their sons had done in their lives or how they had met their deaths. She started keeping the things she knew those grieving families would have little use for or understanding of: a nicotine-stained cigarette case, dented; a pair of bent pince-nez fallen down the back of a bedframe; pieces of letters, ripped up, left in wastepaper baskets and meant for the fire.

She hadn’t truly known any of their names, and didn’t remember many of their faces. But she remembered these lost artifacts of them, and cherished them.

It took her years to screw up the courage to take anything from Master Nightingale, purely because he had so little left to spare.

She got her chance, finally, in the Fifties, when he was only just starting to do more than read his way through the library from beginning to end and end to beginning, his days filled with precious little else but a rigorously maintained, hour-long constitutional walk round and around the square. On one of these walks, he came back in a foul mood, and gave her the remnants of his favorite pipe, which he had managed to drop; it was broken in three pieces, the bowl separated from the stem and the stem shattered, and he muttered at her to get rid of it as he went in search of a spare in his bedroom upstairs, looking tired and grey and fed up with it all.

She kept the pipe, meticulously mended it, and, the next day, he caught her polishing it in the kitchen.

“What on earth,” he’d said, and, taking it out of her hands, seemed to see her properly for the first time. “How the devil did you manage that?”

He went quiet, then, and looked frankly back at the desperate, squirming longing in her eyes. His hair had been starting to go silver, at that time, and as his expression softened, he took on the gentility she had always expected of him.

“There,” he said, depositing it gently back into her palms. “No matter. I’m making do perfectly well with the other one.”

He stopped watching her so closely or suspiciously, after that – like he had started to remember that he had enjoyed her company, once, and protected her, after his own fashion, from the ones who would rather have beat her, and like she wasn’t part of an old world that could do nothing anymore but haunt him.

Collecting from Walid, decades later, was a fascinating enterprise. She learned quickly that although he was far from a scattered man, he was far more prone to leaving bits and pieces of himself behind in the Folly – even in the first few months when it seemed all he wanted to do was camp in the libraries and quiz Nightingale on magical phenomena great and small he forgot pencils and pens, managed to get a lab coat irredeemably burned in the downstairs laboratory, made notes, then scribbled them out, and absentmindedly chucked them nowhere near the closest wastepaper basket. There was enough for her to harvest that she sometimes took pity on him when he arrived and patted, frowning, at his pockets when he realized he’d no writing implements left, and whisked out one or other of the biros she had swept up, which never failed to earn her his smiles and thanks.

He also had a camera with him, she discovered one day – not every day, not every visit, but there was often something called a ‘Polaroid’ in the jumble of his bag, which looked like someone had taken an old-fashioned Brownie and put it through some sort of mangler. She startled and hissed when he first used it on a specimen – a hunk of rock he and the Master had collected in Cornwall – unused to the flash and the odd clicking noise of it, but when he shook out the paper and she saw _herself_ looking back at her, her blacks and whites and wide eyes fading more and more strongly into view, she was amazed.

“Like it?” Abdul said, smiling. “You can keep it if you want. Though I wouldn’t mind another, for my files.”

He was a collector too, she realized belatedly, though he had always the words and the tools and the books to make sure _his_ stash was free of guilt or insults. And he knew it of her, too, because he had followed her down into the cellar one morning when she wasn’t quite aware of his presence, in 1984, and found her standing over the chest under the stairs, the one filled with the past, and his eyes had glittered with interest and understanding and maybe a little bit of pity at the sight of all the detritus of other peoples’ lives that she had made hers.

“Hm,” was all he’d said, and then he went back upstairs, and she prayed that that would be the end of it, that he hadn’t looked closely enough to recognize the pieces she’d taken from him, from both his visits and his coat pockets.

It wasn’t the end of it, but it only changed for the better, because a few weeks later, when winter was coming on, Walid came blowing into the Folly bundled up to his eyes in a tatty tartan scarf and with a small cardboard box under his arm; and after dinner, when Nightingale was building up a fire in the parlour, he sat down in the kitchen and set the box before her on the table.

“Found these when I was having a clearout,” he said. “I need to move to new rooms soon – the ones I’m in now aren’t really fit for pigs to live in, let alone students. I won’t be keeping all of them, so I thought you might like to pick out a few for your box.”

They worked over the Polaroids for almost an hour as her fingers flipped nimbly through them, shaking only a little bit in her excitement. She chose several haphazard frames of mist-covered hills in what must have been Scotland, the muddy limbs and grinning faces of teenaged friends; she made a horrendous face at him for the one someone had taken of him with a truly appalling, head-half-shaved haircut and a feather dangling from his ear (“Yes, I’m not sure it’d suit me now,” he’d grimaced), and watched him write names on the backs of others, identifying young men and women he’d studied and pranked and drunk with and fallen asleep with over books in libraries with towering ceilings.

(She was proud of herself, years later, for having taken such good care of his bequest. One December, in the nineties, he had asked her for one of the photos back – the one with the other twenty-something men and the pub and the disco lights in it – and, his face drawn but his hand steady, scribbled a little series of dates next to a few of the fading names. HARRY 14-12-88, JAMES 3-6-89, CHARLIE 22-5-87, he wrote, and then he had blown on the ink to dry it and handed it back to her with a sad smile. _Thank you for keeping it safe_ , he’d said, and then she put it back into her box, and they never spoke of it again.)

After that week when the Master rushed out in the middle of the night in 1990 and brought Walid home with him, Walid asked her to take photographs of his bruises for posterity and his own collection of evidence of what he called ‘Injuries Inflicted by Cryptozoological Species.’ It made her shiver to do it, and was glad that he made sure to smile at her while she snapped away, her head lowered, to remind her that he and the Master were both alive and whole.

He gave her something in return and apology – a little box of plastic, garishly covered in yellow and red and purple carboard, which called itself the KODAK FLING 35. He showed her how to use it, and she forgot to not let her tongue slip out of the corner of her mouth as she concentrated on squinting through the little bubble through which she could see the world; he wrote down a list of the addresses and phone numbers of the nearest chemists who could develop the film for her, and then looked appropriately commiserative when she got back her first set of flimsy photos, feeling so much less permanent than the Polaroids, only to find that her fingers had, apparently, been over the lens on every single last one of them.

“Bad luck,” he’d said ruefully. “But I’m sure you’ll get better at it. You always do.”

She used her camera as often as she could in the first few months of owning it, whenever she was fascinated by angles of light striking the Folly’s floors which she had never quite noticed before, or when she wanted to see what the blue-white flames of the stovetop looked like on film, or when she was particularly proud of how a Sunday roast looked on her pristine plates. And with Walid suddenly living in the Folly and sleeping in the Master’s bedroom, her choice of human subjects had abruptly doubled: whereas Nightingale generally acquiesced to her shuffling, pointed requests for a pose only with raised eyebrows and a (fond, nevertheless) exasperation, Walid was more than happy to sit still and be directed until she was satisfied. The one photo they had managed to sneak, together, of Walid casually throwing up his fingers in a V behind Nightingale’s head as he sat oblivious over his morning edition of _The Telegraph_ , became one of Molly’s most prized – and most secret – possessions.

She wished she could use the Kodak even more often, but even she, the thief of things and moments and time, knew that some boundaries couldn’t be crossed. She could take a photograph through the crack in a door when, exhausted by an all-day outing, the Master and Walid were dead to the world together, the Master’s forgotten newspaper slipping from his hand and Walid’s head on his shoulder on one of the long, low divans in the parlour; she could steal a snap of them just back from a night at Covent Garden, one of Nightingale’s few concessions to a life outside the Folly, when they were both tired but handsome in evening jackets and pocket squares. But she couldn’t capture the looks they gave each other over dinner, nor the looks they gave _her,_ or their gratitude, or what she saw when she crept into the Master’s bedroom in the early mornings to wake Walid for his shifts, the quiet tangle of them, the peace.

Nevertheless, she tried.

She took more pictures than she cared to admit of Toby, when he arrived in Peter’s wake. (The internet told her that this was a perfectly acceptable activity, however, and she was perfectly happy to believe it.) She took even more when, while in the middle of one of his frequent bouts of pontificating about the Folly’s technical backwardness, Peter managed to winkle an extra smartphone for her into the divisional budget. “You’re staff, you deserve it,” he’d said, stubborn and happy at the thought that he was doing something good for her – a week later, he looked over her shoulder and gawked at all of her apps, all the ones which could adjust every single parameter of every one of her photos from 0 to 100, could turn them black and white, could highlight a single beam of light, and declared her a natural.

Into her chest went all the things Peter lost, because he tended to. He somehow lost odd socks even though she cleaned and monitored her laundry and his room with rigorous precision, and so she kept the mismatched spares. She started a collection of all the phones he ruefully chucked in the bin, their processors fried, as he and Walid sorted out when they could or could not use them around magic; she kept, carefully washed, and set aside old t-shirts that he had worn through when he just wanted to be comfortable, or which had been ripped; she kept his half-buttons, snapped by the force of falling concrete or impellos or whatever other monster had tried to hurt him, as evidence of his survival.

The only thing she kept of Lesley May’s was a broken piece of elastic – it had been threaded too many times through the fastenings of her mask, and it broke while she was at the Folly and her face had slipped out, and she had half-screamed with frustration and stormed away to find another, leaving Molly with the remnants. She put it deep into a corner of her chest, covered it with a slim date-book from 1932, and never looked at it again.

Peter was still in Herefordshire, chasing what she had heard were unicorns (she studiously didn’t think about it too often, because she knew what they looked like, what they smelled like, knew the sound of their thundering hooves and nighttime shrieks), when, after a morning when the Master spent more than an hour in quiet conversation on the phone in the atrium out of the hearing of Varvara as she skulked in the kitchen under Molly’s watchful eye, wandering slowly back and forth as far as the reach of the cable would allow him, he came into the mundane library while Molly was dusting and gave her a long, odd look.

“Well,” he said eventually. “Abdul and I gave notice last week, and we’ve set a date. I was wondering – whether you’d care to be a witness?”

She tripped towards him, grinning, her teeth so sharp she thought she might have been in danger of cutting her own lips.

“You’d have to go outside,” he said, his eyes widened slightly at her reaction, though she seemed to be inspiring him to share at least a little of her enthusiasm as his smile grew. “And we’ll have to make sure your passport and so on are up to date – can’t have you giving false testimony. Does all that sound all right?”

Molly nodded rapidly, squeezed her duster, and giggled her consent.

She started to put together her gift that very night. Up went the lid to the chest, out came her treasures; the Master’s armoires and bookshelves were raided, and Amazon.co.uk furnished her impatience with a same-day delivery of a handsome, handmade, leather-bound album which smelled of pressed cloth and fresh mill-water. (It would go well with the bound folios the Master had already had made up years before, containing the neatly-typed and scientifically rigorous papers Walid had written to and for himself when he was starting to go a bit mad about not being able to publish bloody _anywhere_ about _anything_ to do with the demimonde.) Her first addition was to creep into the mundane library, flick quickly through the wooden filing cabinets of agreements and oaths and contracts, and carefully pull out the handsome charter from 2004, which had stayed pristine and undamaged in its hiding place; she put it carefully between the last two pages of the album, and then went to work on the rest of it with scissors and lukewarm glue, fussing over the exact arrangement of every Polaroid, every disposable photo with red-eye, every old sepia-toned portrait the Master had locked away of unsmiling Edwardian gatherings and blurred wartime comrades, every crumpled-up and smoothed-out scrap of paper.

She was finished by the time Peter came home in the third week of August, when he looked simultaneously shattered _and_ like the entire world had been handed to him to keep in his pocket. He spent a lot of time staring and smiling at nothing, and a lot of time talking to Beverley – Molly figured it out quickly enough, given the Master’s relieved, sideways looks – on his mobile in the coach house, and was gentle in ways he hadn’t been even when he was still in his state of general shock when he first came to the Folly, and certainly not since Lesley had gone.

A week after that, as September came on, seemed as good a time as any for Molly to share the secret she was bursting with. She put the album and the piece of paper down in front of Peter at breakfast on the morning of the 1st, when the Master was already down in the laboratory, and waited for him to finish swallowing what looked like a painfully large bite of fried bread.

“What’s this?” he said through his mouthful, picking up the note. “WEDNESDAY SEPTEMBER 10TH, 2:00PM, CAMDEN TOWN HALL.”

He stopped chewing, and looked at Molly, wide-eyed. “Oh my god,” he said, and swallowed again to stop spitting crumbs. “They’re finally doing it.”

Molly nodded rapidly.

“How did you find out?”

Molly picked up the note and pulled her trusty fountain pen (nicked from an Anthony Peters, wizard of the Folly 1916-1925) out of her apron pocket. _WITNESS_ , she wrote.

“Bloody hell,” Peter said, grinning. “That’s fantastic. Has Nightingale sorted out your papers?” Another nod. “Can I come? I mean – they’re not planning on going it alone, are they?”

She screwed up her mouth, making her displeasure clear, and Peter looked a lot more solemn.

“Ah. They are. What shall we do about it?”

The pen. _GUESTS._

“I mean, I can try, but – do you think they’ll take to being barged in on?”

Molly wondered how she would be able to convey it all in her face. How much they deserved it, and how much she wanted it to be known, and how much she thought it would _help_ for it to be known, and held up, proudly, to the bits of the world that mattered.

She must have managed at least some of it, because Peter’s grin was growing wide. “Yeah, okay,” he said. “Let’s do it.”

She left him looking at the album, his face becoming open and softer each time he turned a page, and went to clear up the breakfast things, content.

Peter left early on the morning of the 10th, saying he wanted to chat over case notes from Herefordshire with the Folly’s Met colleagues (“It’s called liaising, sir, you might want to try it”), leaving the two of them to get ready alone. Molly left the album quietly on Nightingale’s favored side-table in the mundane library, knowing that it would eventually be found and appreciated, and met the Master at the door to the coach house at one-thirty, wearing black and blue silk which she rather suspected made her look like a walking bruise; it suited her, though, made her feel light and slippery and some passing resemblance to elegant even as she plotted her next frightening steps, with the sun beating down outside and her freshly-printed passport in her skirt pocket. Nightingale had taken particular care in dressing, she could tell, though few people catching sight of him on the street in a bespoke black suit and sharp tie, sans boutonniere, was likely to peg him as being on the way to be married.

“Shall we?” he asked; she could see the understanding in his face, that for her to walk out into the courtyard, and to have time to steel herself down the shadowed alleyway that he and Peter used as a driveway, was by far the better way for her to re-enter the world that for her to march right out of the front door onto the pavement of Russell Square. She had Toby with her on his lead – she hadn’t thought it right for him to be the only one left at home – and he yapped and pounced ahead of them, chasing dancing leaves, lightening her thoughts.

The walk northeast to Camden Town Hall was mercifully short, and Walid was waiting for them at the entrance, looking up at the neoclassical stone façade. One of Molly’s only fleeting doubts about the day, one she had spent rather too much time on worrying over, had been what Walid might wear – she and the Master had, after all, witnessed far too many instances of his clash of styles with the Folly and its occupants over the years (the day when he had brought an old student-days leather jacket over just to make a point, with silver spikes in its shoulders, had nearly sent Nightingale into quiet conniptions). But she needn’t have worried, because he was perfectly well turned-out in a dark suit of his own, the only noticeable difference between him and Nightingale being that he had plumped for a bow tie.

There was a woman with him, too, which Molly had known to expect – the second legally-required witness, the sister down from Scotland, Christine. Molly had to admit to a certain amount of fascination about her, but hung back, nonetheless, as the brisk, smiling redhead turned to Nightingale in her floral dress and gave him a brief kiss on each cheek; the brief nervousness in her face when she looked at Molly was quickly and visibly overtaken by the reminder of why they were all there, and her hand was warm and firm as she clasped Molly’s frozen one.

Up the marble stairs they went, and then there were two doors; the registrars were waiting at one, and indicated that the other was to the ceremony room, but that there was paperwork to complete first, and so away they all went with a “This way, gents,” and Molly and Christine and Toby were left alone.

Which was when Peter stuck his head around the pillar halfway up the staircase, grinned, and started jogging up towards them. He was in his full police dress uniform, with his checked cap – thankfully not the helmet – under his arm, his tie perfectly knotted and his buttons and the pins in his epaulettes shining.

“All clear?” he asked, and at Molly’s nod, he turned back down the stairs and shouted “Right then, you lot, look lively.”

They came in a smiling, tripping wave, shushing each other to keep quiet – Stephanopolous, Seawoll, Frank Caffrey, and Sahra Guleed, all looking extremely neat and tidy in their own police and fire service uniforms; Beverley Brook, resplendent in a flowing purple dress; Effra Thames, her dreadlocks shot through with gold over her brightly-patterned suit, with Oberon, his own uniform coat smelling of sandalwood and camphor, looking suitably grave by her side. Harold Postmartin was looking tired and leaning on a cane, but his eyes lit up at the sight of Molly over his checked bow tie, and he kissed the air over her hand before she followed him into the room that was laid aside for the ceremony – it was entirely paneled in dark wood, carpeted in a deep patterned green which matched the upholstery on the handsome chairs, and Molly couldn’t help but think it was perfect.

There followed a whispering, shuffling minute or two as they all got themselves seated and Molly primly nudged Toby to lie down at her feet despite all the exciting distractions he was being tempted by; and then the door they had closed behind them and the two registrars came in, followed by Abdul, who stopped dead in the doorway, staring at them all. And then he let out a little burst of a laugh and turned, grinning, back to say something to what was no doubt Nightingale behind him.

Molly had a brief, thrilling moment of fear that she had miscalculated, that the Master would turn and run at what was, after all, an unexpected invasion of his close-held privacy. But then Oberon said “ _All rise_ ,” in a deep, commanding voice which evoked spells at midnight and heady summer heat, and as they all stood Walid came back in, with Nightingale’s hand firmly in his, and Nightingale looked not so much confused as wondering, a slight smile on his pale face as they walked together down the little aisle between the chairs; he didn’t pause, but Molly saw him grip hard at Peter’s elbow as he went past, and then his hand was on hers, too, cool and thankful, before he turned away.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” the chief registrar said, looking tired and a little sweaty. “The place in which you are now met has been duly sanctioned, according to law, for the celebration of marriage.”

“I should hope so,” someone who sounded suspiciously like Stephanopolous whispered. “Otherwise we’re all buggered.”

Peter leaned forward to Molly, his grin widening. “I might have regrets about all of this.”

She gave him a sharp look, but, at that moment, couldn’t find room in herself to be disapproving.

“On behalf of Thomas and Abdul, I would like to welcome you all here today to share with them in this wedding ceremony. Through their vows they are making a commitment to each other, and through your presence here you are expressing your support for them. However, if any person here present knows of any lawful impediment to this marriage then he or she should declare it now.”

Beverley nearly giggled. It was a close thing. Peter, his lip twitching, elbowed her quite hard in the ribs to make sure she didn’t, as the registrar droned on about things Molly was irritated to find weren’t particularly relevant or appropriate to the Master, about everyday living and being best friends and the need to accept. They’d already sorted that out, she found herself thinking, and anyone who didn’t know _that_ didn’t deserve to know them.

“I call upon these persons here,” Nightingale repeated under prompting, and he actually looked out at them all for the briefest of moments, managing to convey some very stern expectations, “to witness that I, Thomas, do take thee, Abdul – ”

“’M gonna cry,” Beverley whispered, sounding surprised at herself. “Are you crying?”

“Yep,” Peter said cheerfully. Behind them, someone loudly blew their nose, and when Molly turned to look back she had to say she was shocked to see that it was DCI Seawoll, who looked furious at everything and everyone as he scrubbed at his face with a horrible paisley-patterned handkerchief. Stephanopolous, beaming, was patting him matter-of-factly on the shoulder.

She hadn’t helped with the rings, but they had both come to her, separately, for her approval, which was only right and proper. Nightingale had fussed for an unreasonable amount of time over whether it would be an imposition to give Abdul one at all – would he really want it? Would it just be a nuisance what with all the times he would have to take it off in surgery and in his labs to do his work? – but he had turned meek in the face of Molly’s glares, and subsequently went off down to the forge for a few hours a day for half a week until he emerged with something for her to inspect. It was solid and thick, made of matte, perfectly smooth silver, and she could tell there was magic imbued in every particle of it, the sort of vestigia that made her think of warm hearths and brisk mornings and the smell of a newly-opened hundred-year-old bottle of wine.

Walid had been far more straightforward about it; he’d simply come in to her in the kitchen one day two weeks earlier, fished a box out of his pocket, and showed her a perfectly acceptable and classically perfect gold band, of fine quality but with no adornments or embellishments whatsoever.

“Tradition for a traditional man,” he’d said, smiling. “Will it do?” And she’d nodded, telling him that yes, for the Master, anything at all would do to serve as a physical reminder of what he’d never thought he would have.

“Let everyone now recognise that you are husband and husband,” the registrar said, sounding slightly happier as they reached towards the end. “May you treasure this trust and responsibility, may no failure or misfortune ever part you, and may you live full and rich lives together. Congratulations.”

Yes, Molly found herself thinking – that bit was alright. And the Master had no hesitation at all in him, she knew, just gentleness and a bit of fading surprise and good deal more determination, when he took Walid’s hand again and leaned in sideways for a kiss. Peter started the clapping, and it felt more and right when everyone else joined in – even Seawoll, once he was done surreptitiously doing whatever it was he was doing with his horrid hanky.

“Let the witnesses approach to complete the register,” the assistant registrar said, and Molly gave Toby’s lead to Peter and stood, waiting quietly with Christine at the head of the lines of chairs while the Master and Walid went about signing their own names. The bend of Nightingale’s body was familiar – she had seen them do this before, after all, on a warm night in 2004, when there was no-one else to see them but her in the mundane library – as he took up the pen, but this time it somehow seemed better.

Then he turned and, with a touch to her back, gave her the pen, and she signed _Molly Oriana_ as though it had always been her name before giving it to Christine, who was waiting arm in arm with Abdul, her eyes shining.

There was one other part of the day in store which Molly had managed to arrange via some very short, but very direct, emails – it was Seawoll, out of the entire assembly, who looked the most surprised (and relieved) to hear that they were expected in the back room of The Norfolk Arms, a posh pub a few minutes’ walk away, for what Molly understood was called a reception. It was during that walk along the bustling pavements, with them all breaking into groups of twos or threes to chat, and as Molly was just starting to not shiver at the touch of the sun, that a cool hand snaked through her arm.

“We won’t tell, by the way,” Beverley said, grinning as she patted Molly’s shoulder. Ordinarily Molly would have been startled by being touched at all, let alone by a river goddess who smelled of lilies, but somehow Beverley’s presence calmed her, let her feel rooted to the earth instead of floating above it. “Effra and me, I mean. I know there are bastards who would take advantage, but we’re not going to let Ty or any of her lot get their sticky paws on this news.”

“Much appreciated, I’m sure,” Peter answered for both of them, from Molly’s other side, managing to convey both their gratitude and their wry assurance that anyone who _did_ intend to ‘use the news’ would have rather a lot to contend with.

“This was _really_ nice,” Beverley added, smiling, as they got to the pub door and she switched partners, snaking her arm through Peter’s instead as Oberon and Effra, smiling and regal, passed them by. “Thank you, Molly.”

She inclined her head, more pleased than she ever would have been able to say even if she did speak, and waited silently, with Toby whining around her ankles, as the guests made their way into the Arms; Seawoll was already halfway through ordering his first pint, and Frank and Postmartin had already snatched up an entire platter of prawn finger sandwiches between them, as Molly looked back along the pavement.

She wished she had her camera. She would have to be content with all the memories she now kept, and the constructed image of this moment: the Master and Walid walking towards her, leaning in to each other to say things no one else could hear, Walid’s free hand in his pocket and his undone bow tie hanging around his neck, Nightingale’s suit pristine and his staff shining bright silver.

“Molly,” Walid called, as they came within earshot and they both looked up to her; he let go of Nightingale and opened his arms, and she stepped straight into them, letting herself smile against his shoulder as he gave her a rocking hug. “You’re a marvel,” he said into her ear, and then he kissed her cheek and, lifting Toby’s lead from her fingers, went inside with Toby yapping at his heels, clearly overdue for his treats.

“This was all your idea, I take it,” the Master said quietly; he was giving her that slight look of discovery which he had had ever more frequently since he first started opening the Folly’s doors again, when Walid opened his heart to something or Peter opened his eyes to new parts of the world. “Thank you.”

She smiled, and took his offered arm, and went in to her collection of family, happy to know that it was, somehow, a little more complete.

*

**Author's Note:**

> [This](https://www.camden.gov.uk/ccm/cms-service/stream/image/?image_id=2931103) is the room in Camden Town Hall that I had in mind. ~~(No I'm not preparing for my own wedding and currently obsessed with all this palaver, shhhh.)~~ Title from James Thomson's _A Poem Sacred to the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton_ (1727). Thanks for reading!


End file.
